week 7

Crazy times indeed, so I have a new martial artist, a student, and very enthusiastic about this project, which makes for two performers who are excited about doing this project, which I am grateful for. Before I get into that, I had to make sure I have their outfits together and boy was that stressful for me, so much goes into this, I haven't thought that getting their outfits together was going to be this tough. I called and emailed at least a dozen seamstress's, and some were too busy, or when I gave them a description of the outfit, they said it looked too complicated to do etc. So now I had to improvise and do everything myself, so what I did was spoke to my advisor and we talked about how I can do this, so what I did was I visited a couple of Value Villages, got a costume for a executioner for a base set template for the bad guy, got alot of fabric, and alot of sports equipment, shin pads, chest pads, arm pads etc. Next I got a nice sleeveless shirt from Zellers, got a belt from this army place on Granville, and for the final piece for the Ryu a silver face mask from Bazaar Party, which on the filming day, was finally custom cut from the Kev (Ryu actor) to form the top part! (good work there Kev!) So it took me a couple of days to make everything, I spray painted and or felt penned all the sports equipment, to make them all black. I cut all the fabric for the head pieces and cut up some strips for Ryu's clothing, to make them tighter for a more of a ninja look. On the day of the shoot the bad guy, he was a bit shorter than I anticipated, so I had cut his fabric a bit shorter, for movement. All in all the outfits turned out pretty good, for doing it all myself.

As for the shoot we shot it all in one day, I had the Chinese Garden in China town booked for that day, although when we got there no one told the front office, so they looked it up, and nada, so I told them who I spoke with, so they just let me use the garden after that. We walked in and looked for a spot, there was a tour guide going around, so we needed a more of a private area, and we found the Scholars area to be that spot. After waiting for the tour guide to finish with that area, and some tourists asking to take a picture of us, well mostly the Ninja actors, with me the film director/cameraman/choreographer in the background with the big smile, we finally got to shoot.

We took about 4 hours of time there, from set up to filming to take down. I got some tips from this choreographer, about what needed to be shot, although with him not being there last minute, I had to again improvise on what I wanted, and what angles to do it at, its pretty tough, and I have complete respect for film makers/directors/choreographers, as its alot of work to direct your actors, as they look to you for direction and to tell them what to do. I have done this before with our green screen projects in term 2 and the music video, but this being my final project, I had to really make this footage above decent, and this is only going to happen once, as there are no re-shoots, as these guys are travelling and are volunteering their time, plus a time constraint as Nov. 6 is the last day to hand in this project.

After this location was done with we then proceeded to the Production room at 420 Homer, or as I like to call it Greeneroom. I had the room booked for 5pm, but lo and behold good ol' pal Morgan was still working...so I heard, but he was no where to be found! we waited for a bit, and he then finally arrived, he said he had the room till 11, but I told him I had it from 5, heh so there was communication problem with booking. So anyways I said we'll wait, the performers checked their emails, and we waited for over a hour, went back no Morgan, we waited for about 20 min. I then was pondering about taking down the set, as we were all starting to get tired, I said I'll wait another 5 min. just in case, lucky I did lol, as Morgan finally got back, and needed to shoot one more guy, as he finished, he shot some cool pics with his fancy camera, and helped setup the lights real fast, he is a pro! Thanks Morgan! So with that we got onto our shots, basically some closeups, some duplicates, the final slice as I like to call it, and some fun ones with Jervin, doing some acrobatic jumps.